WWDC 2018 live blog: Apple unveils its frameworks for the future

The first major Apple keynote of 2018 is just hours away, and it’s going to be a doozy. Apple is expected to give us our first look at iOS 12 and macOS 10.14, plus new software for Apple TV, Apple Watch and Apple Music. Some new hardware might also be in the cards as well, but we’ll have to wait until Tim Cook takes the stage to find out.

No, Apple isn’t combining iOS and macOS. However, Craig is now going to offer a sneak peek at a coming technology. How will Mac tap into the massive universe of iOS apps? Currently, porting an app is hard, he says. So Apple is going to start testing running its own iOS apps on Mac — you know, like Apple News and Stocks (mentioned early). This capability will be coming to devs next year so they can start bringing their own third-party iOS apps to Mac.

A new tool called Create ML lets coders easily add machine learning to their apps, even if they’re not experts. The computation training time for adding this AI boost has been drastically cut as well — 30 percent faster on-device computation. This undoubtedly means better apps for everyone, coming soon to an Apple device near you.

Safari in Mojave and iOS 12 will make tracking you online much more difficult in other ways, as well. Safari will give data miners only stripped-down info like system configurations, installed fonts, etc., so your basic Mac setup will look like loads of other basic Mac setups. So long, personally identifiable data!

Continuity Camera looks super useful. It lets you select an area on a document where you want to add a picture. Then you can choose to take a picture and it automatically opens your iPhone camera and transfers it to your Mac instantly.

And now for a brief history of Mac operating system California names. After a “four-year mountain-bound bender,” Craig Federighi says, it’s time for “some striking changes. And we’ve left the high country for a place entirely different, but no less beautiful.”

Zero Sign-on for Apple TV? Yes, please. “No credentials needed, it just works!” Charter Spectrum will be first cable provider to offer, with more coming in time. If this works, it will eliminate the single most annoying thing about Apple TV.

Wow, big tiles show off key people involved in a Group FaceTime, with a “Roster” at the bottom of the app showing everyone participating. The thumbnails blow up to showcase whoever is talking at any given moment.

FaceTime is finally getting group FaceTime. You can now FaceTime with up to 32 participants at the same time! It’s being integrated with Messages too so you can start a big group call straight from a text message conversation. Looks super useful, people can jump in and out of the call at will.

You can now set app limits so you get a notification that your time is almost up. Once you’ve reached your limit the app tells you to move on. Limits sync across your iPhone and iPad. For parents, a new feature lets you set time limits on each app or for a category of apps.

“Screen Time empowers you with both insight and control over how you spend your time,” Craig says. Each week, you’ll get a weekly summary of just how much time you spent with your iPhone, what you did and when, etc. How much time you spent in apps, which apps sent you the most notifications, and more.

Siri Shortcuts look pretty slick. Set ’em up to kick off a series of standard events/scenes. For instance, you might set up one called “Heading home” to turn on your AC, give you driving directions and load your favorite streaming radio station. Hope they work as seamlessly as advertised. (Also, you can run them from your HomePod or Apple Watch.)

And you’re absolutely right, Ed — the fact that Shortcuts are baked into Siri will make this feature much more likely to be used. If it works.

“Siri is more than just a voice,” Craig says. Now Siri is going to start offering up a ton more suggestions. For instance, it might remind you to turn on Do Not Disturb when you get to the movie theater. Or pester you to order your favorite coffee drink when you step into your local cafe.

Next up Siri: Apple is opening up Siri with shortcuts that pull in specific tasks from apps that have access to the home screen. There’s a new Shortcuts app too! It looks like Apple is finally integrating Workflow stuff into iOS 12

iOS 12 adds a new For You tab to Photos. It brings up photos you took on this day in past years. Effect suggestions are also offered to help make your shots look better. It looks a lot like Google Photos tbh.

iPhone captures 1 trillion photos per year! This year Apple is making the Photos app better with improved search. Search suggestions will surface pictures that it thinks you might be interested. You can search for places, people, or categories.

LEGO is demoing its new ARKit app and it looks so dope. Kind of like a mix of Minecraft and AR games. The app can detect your LEGO set and then lets you add stuff to it digitally. You can play with 4 friends in the same space.

I’m expecting additional uses for the facial scanners currently only in the iPhone X. Unconfirmed reports indicate all of the 2018 iPhone models will have these scanners, New animoji are just the start.

I agree, Buster. Although this is sometimes forgotten, this really is Apple’s developer conference, Time was, Apple didn’t announce any hardware here. Still, it has modified this rule enough that some people look for new phones and tablets. And HomePods.

Apple has been beefing up its Siri team, so I’m confident good things are happening. Apple is likely to make some promises about Siri today because this voice-activated digital assistant has received so much bad press. I personally have called it “dumb as a squirrel” on any number of occasions.

Everybody wants that iPhone SE upgrade, Buster. Everybody. And they also want AirPower. Like, right now. Apple should hand them out to all attendees (along with the wireless charging cases for AirPods).

There’s got to be new HomePod and Siri stuff, even though we just got AirPlay 2 last week with iOS 11.4. They’ve got to give Siri more powers on HomePod if they want to compete with other smart speakers. (And I hope we don’t need to wait another year for the new features they talk up today to actually, you know, roll out.)

I’m torn about whether there’ll be any new iPad Pro models. I’m really expecting to see tablets with Face ID, but the iPad Pro line was refreshed a year ago, and Apple has moved to an 18 month schedule for replacing its tablets. So it seems a bit too soon.

It’s a big cavernous room here for this morning’s keynote. There’s a giant screen up front and two big ‘side’ screens on either side for all the people on the fringes. Someone said the room is accommodates 6,000. The room is filing up fast. There’s a real buzz. Folks are very excited.

Of course, we’re having tech troubles: WiFi is already crapped out, and so is the local cell network. Working hard here to figure it out!

At last year’s WWDC, we got some awesome hardware — 10.5-inch iPad Pro, HomePod and iMac Pro — plus all the usual software updates. In case you want to kill a couple minutes while waiting for the live stream to start, check out these WWDC 2017 “sketchnotes,” which are basically a comic book recap of the big event.